Best Buy changes course, will support Apple Pay in its iOS app today, in retail stores later this year
Mike Beasley / 9to5Mac :
Context & Ripple Effects
Best Buy is reversing its earlier resistance to Apple's wallet, switching on Apple Pay in its iOS app today with store rollout promised for later this year. It follows Home Depot's decision a week earlier to accept Apple Pay after an equipment upgrade, which had made that home-improvement chain the largest US retailer supporting the service.
The move also fits a broader deepening of the Best Buy–Apple relationship: by August the retailer was beating earnings expectations while committing to sell the Apple Watch in all of its roughly 1,050 stores alongside AppleCare.
First-order effects
- Shoppers using Best Buy's iOS app can check out with Apple Pay starting today, and anyone buying Apple hardware there gains a payment path consistent with the Apple ecosystem the chain is expanding around.
Second-order effects
- Remaining large retailers still holding out face mounting pressure to fund NFC terminal upgrades or risk looking outdated next to Home Depot and Best Buy — a pressure that later showed up when even pharmacy and convenience chains like CVS and 7-Eleven came aboard.
Third-order effects
- As acceptance broadens, Apple pushes from the consumer side of the counter to the merchant side too — its later Tap to Pay launch with partners like Stripe and Shopify lets any US merchant take payments with just an iPhone — concentrating more of the payments stack on one company's platform and drawing regulatory attention in Europe as its transaction share grows.
The trend: US retail is converging on NFC wallet acceptance, shifting from a patchwork of holdout chains to near-universal support while Apple extends the same rails from consumers' phones into merchants' own devices.